With Gaza in Financial Crisis, Fears That ‘an Explosion’s Coming’<br />While thousands of Palestinian Authority workers in Gaza like Mr. Abu Shaaban were forced into early retirement,<br />and those who remained saw their pay cut 40 percent, some 40,000 Hamas workers — many of them police officers — have not been paid in months, officials say.<br />Hamas, eager to rid itself of the burdens of governing — though unwilling to disarm its military wing — showed flexibility at the talks, quickly ceding control over border crossings like the one with Israel at Kerem Shalom,<br />and the tax collections there that had provided it with some $20 million a month.<br />But that meant keeping an enormous degree of control over the flow of people, cargo, energy<br />and international aid across the border — and as it clamps down, the resulting social harm in Gaza can blow back against Israel.<br />And Israel, in an underground-barrier project with a nearly $1 billion price tag, is steadily<br />sealing its border to the attack tunnels into Israel that Gaza militants spent years digging.<br />The one it has resorted to three times — going to war with Israel, in hopes of generating international sympathy<br />and relief in the aftermath — suddenly seems least attractive.<br />At the heart of the crisis — and its most immediate cause — is a crushing financial squeeze, the result of a tense standoff between Hamas, the militant Islamist group<br />that rules Gaza, and Fatah, the secular party entrenched on the West Bank.<br />Last year, the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, ratcheted up the pressure on Hamas, stopping its payments for fuel for Gaza’s power station<br />and to Israel for electrical transmission into the Gaza Strip.
